Quickly Tuning Vocals In Melodyne

Melodyne can be a daunting program to master, but in this age of “perfect it in the mix”, it’s one of those tools that you can really benefit from knowing.

I want to show you in this video how to ‘easily’ tune a track using Melodyne as a plugin in Pro Tools or whatever your flavor of DAW.

Clean up your track. Clean up punches, do crossfades… whatever you need to do so that when you track it in to Melodyne, you won’t be bothered by punches. It’s easier to fix them in your DAW and almost impossible in Melodyne unless you track it back in again

Track your vocal into Melodyne. You can track multiple tracks at once with the new Melodyne but for our example, we are looking at one track. You can also edit multiple tracks at once but that is for another video.

Double click the licks. Melodyne will take the average of the note that it detects. If there are actually two notes in one “blob”, then Melodyne will “tune” that note to a note between those notes… so you need to separate any notes like “quick licks”, “Fall offs” and “Yodles” and “Scoops” so that Melodyne understands which part of the note to tune.

Double click the track When you are in note selection mode, Select All (right click) and double-click. This will quantize the pitches to the right place. When you separate the licks out in step 3, you will be (mostly) happy with the results.

Listen. Melodyne will get most of the notes right, but depending on your singer, it WILL tune notes to the wrong place. Listen line by line and adjust as necessary.

After this, I usually print the tuned vocal to a separate track. I recommend that to you too unless this is an ongoing project that you need to go back and tweak for the producer.